While the HDD installed instead of the optical drive operates flawlessly in Windows, it was not going to work out of the box in Linux, at least in one case. The kernel tries to establish a connection with the disk, but fails to do it (SATA link down entry in /var/log/messages). The solution is to force a 1.5 Gbps transfer speed (instead of 6 Gbps) by adding a libata.force= kernel parameter. See [5] for details.